Nerf Guns and Suction Cup Guns and Toy Guns, Oh My!
Or how I made my ten-year-old cry his guts out over the loss of a destructive concept molded out of plastic and foam
I’ve spent months feeling my way around how to write about this topic, this influence of guns in the lives of my children, and I’ve always drawn a blank as to how to proceed. An event transpired that gave me a path, and I’m taking it. Forewarning, I’m discussing guns and gun violence, and I am taking the stance of a human/adult/parent who is opposed to guns around children in every context I can think of. This is not intended to preach to anyone. This is only my feelings and experiences, and I do approach some aspects with humor and levity. By no means is this intended to belittle the experiences of those whose lives have been harmed and changed by gun violence.
As the days begin to shorten toward the end of summer, there is an urgency felt by all. We’ve been harvesting things from the garden before they either grow too big or get ruined by rain. The pool is almost drained. It’s time to do the walk around the house and caulk up any cracks or gaps. We’re about to split wood for the new wood shed I just built. Busy busy busy. And it turns out my children feel this same need to Get Everything Done, mostly because school starts on Friday. They have spent every single evening outside playing until it is nearly too dark to see.
Parents in the audience? I bet you can relate. If our children want to be outside playing, not in front of a screen, we should rejoice. We should be pleased with ourselves for having done A Good Thing in raising them. And sure. I’m right there with you.
But then, just at the point of near darkness, a solid ten minutes after their mother yelled at them to come in, we heard a scream.
I bet you know the sound and the accompanying sensation. Your child is hurt. Something inside of you pulls on the superhuman strength and speed your body has reserved for just such an emergency, and you fly from the comfort of the couch, your novel or phone tossed aside without a glance, and you race for the nearest point where you can see the child/get to the child/rescue the child/apply pressure to the wound. Take your pick. The momentum of my body in motion nearly flung me off the second story deck, but from that vantage I could see both boys in the fort out back, alive at least, one screaming, the other consoling him.
Let’s back up. [If you’re new to my writing, buckle in. Time isn’t linear for me.] The very first Nerf Crossbow joined our family well before my oldest kid could hold and aim a weapon toy like that. It was a gift from a friend who was excited about us becoming parents, and he’s always provided some of the best? worst? toys I have ever seen. And once kid #1 was big enough to pick that thing up, he wanted to shoot it. Watch kids at a young age play creatively with a variety of toys and you will inevitably see them fire something like it is a gun. I saw that happen with my child and my gut clenched. Hard.
So it went away, into the top of a closet somewhere, tucked away safely.
Years went by, and the desire for “something to shoot” grew in him. And, as so many parents do, my wife and I shrugged and figured perhaps it was a harmless exploration of tools. We picked up a couple of basic Nerf guns for both of the kids, and we made then endure a series of harsh lectures about how we “do not point these at humans or animals,” and we only fire them at tree trunks or cardboard box targets.
Within one day, both kids had been shot by a Nerf bullet.
I suppressed that warning in my gut over and over. They would play with the toy guns, and even if things went right I felt like it was a problem. Many times I had intense conversations with my wife about wanting the guns to go away. It wasn’t always about the Nerf toys. Sometimes it was about the video games they wanted to play. Often it was about the influences at school, with peers, on TV and tablets, in movies and cartoons. But we would both discuss our own childhoods and agree that these, or similar, influences were around for us as well, and look how great we turned out!
But how great did we really turn out? I am desensitized to gun violence. I watch films and TV shows with tons of guns and death and violence, and it’s rare for me to feel upset about what I see (until Homelander let all those people in the airplane die, and THAT really got to me, go figure). When I think about the movies that are the most familiar, the ones I relate to with fondness from my own growing up (You’ll shoot your eye out, Ralphie), many of those are violent and inappropriate by a lot of standards. I see the news online and am no longer shocked at school shootings, mass shootings, death and injury from handguns. Disappointed? Yes. Saddened and hurt? Absolutely. But shocked? Not really. Not enough.
So how should my children handle that same information if they are inundated with it?
And what message do I send to them when I buy them a Nerf gun to play with?
Back to the screaming child. The younger one was hurt. He came running into the house holding a hand over his cheek, a bright red spot blooming barely an inch under his left eye. His big brother had shot him at point blank range after threatening him on the ladder steps of the fort. I brought them inside and sat them down, one crying from pain and fear, the other crying from being caught, from knowing he was in trouble for what had transpired.
And me?
Hell. All I could think was how lucky we all were. It was just a toy. It was soft foam and rubber, malleable plastic, no broken skin, no blood, no trip to the ER, no call to 911, no actual emergency where one of my children could be injured or dead. I am not blowing this out of proportion. Firearms are the number one cause of death for children and teens in the United States.
I have read/heard/seen so many stories of families permanently damaged and torn up over gun violence. I do not want to be them. I don’t want one of my children living with the guilt of killing their sibling. I don’t want to bury a child.
But try explaining to a ten-year-old that I’m taking away his guns.
I swear to you, it was like a second amendment riot in this household. “Please don’t take them away, Papi! Please! Can’t you just hide them in the attic? Hide them for two years! For three years! Hide them for five years! I swear I’ll never shoot my brother in the face again. It was an accident! It was a mistake! I didn’t mean to do it.” I held him and let him cry. He sobbed. His heart was broken over the loss of this toy (actually a collection of them), and honestly I can relate. I know how it feels to lose something you value.
So I told him a story.
Papi – Long, long ago, when I lived on a dinosaur farm, my big brother and I had a toy gun. It shot suction cup darts. I think we had two of them.
Little Dude – Two guns?
Papi – No. Two darts. One gun. We had to share. And you know your uncle. It didn’t go well for me.
Little Dude – Was it big?
Papi – No. Plastic was a scarce resource, slowly mined in the great mountains of Hasbro. If we were lucky, we got one new plastic toy at Christmas each year. Now let me get back to the story. The dart gun was epic. We loved it. We played with it a lot, mostly shooting it at things like windows, because it would stick to them. You’d like the end of the dart (demonstrate licking maneuver), and then fire it quickly before the spit dries. Bam. Brilliant stuff. Problem was, your uncle made a stupid move. He aimed it at our Mom’s head.
Little Dude – Grandma??
Papi – Yep. And Grandma (appropriately) freaked out and took away the gun. FOREVER. Because no parent ever wants to see their child turn a gun on them.
Little Dude – Whoa.
Papi – And I was furious with your uncle. What a bonehead! He was the one who screwed up and lost us that awesome toy! But you know what happened about a week later? We forgot about it and moved on to another toy. And our lives were perfectly fine.
I did not in any way convince my child that the lesson to be learned was to care about his little brother, to feel some sense of remorse over shooting him IN THE FACE, to ask if he was okay, etc. All he cared about was the damn toy. And to top it all off, he began wailing about how I should at least SELL the guns and GIVE HIM THE MONEY from them.
Hangon, let me get this right. Dick Cheney shoots a guy in the face and the guy has to apologize for getting in the way of his bullets, and somehow my child has turned into Dick Cheney?!? And if you don’t remember this bizarre incident from 2006, the breakdown goes like this. Dick and his buddies are out hunting quail. Harry Whittington got in the way of Dick’s shot and took roughly 200 birdshot pellets to the face, some of which remained lodged in his cheek and neck years after the incident. Cheney never apologized for shooting him, but – icing on the cake here – Whittington apologized to Cheney and his family for all the stress they caused.
No, my children do not know about this story.
I’m laughing about my child’s response, specifically wanting me to provide him the profits of his misadventures in pelting his brother’s face with a foam bullet, but the bigger issue at stake is how we are all innately desensitized to this stuff. And I am not okay with that.
You can say what you like, you can beg and plead with me to hide the guns in the attic, but at the end of the day, they’re leaving this house. We are a no gun household once more, and even though the problem isn’t gone, I feel one percent better than I did last night listening to the crying anguish of an injured child running in from the backyard.
It’s the guns.
That’s the bottom line.
It’s the guns.
We will be examining the video games and movies and TV shows we are watching, using a more critical eye in seeing how those influences of guns and violence are impacting all of us. I have no illusion that this will really solve anything, but at least my children know that I am paying attention and that I care very much about how we absorb these messages. Kids only get to be kids for a short time. That time should be filled with as much fun and laughter and creative play as we can handle, and no family should have to face the consequences of a real gun harming one of their children. I hope it doesn’t happen to my family, but I am aware that most of that control is out of my hands. This one small part that is in my control is changing. Because it must.
Your trans friend,
Robin
Parents have to fight their own nerf battles trying to keep them out of their children's hands. Nerf should stick to footballs and gun control policies need serious improvement.
I really appreciate how you convey the complexity of child wanting to play with toy when toy is a pretend thing that only exists for killing. It's tough. Growing up, my parents didn't allow us to have any kind of toy gun with projectile but we definitely had supersoakers. We never had a gun safety conversation about them because I grew up in Canada and you can only own a hand gun if you are registered with a club, which is where the gun is kept because the only time you can use it is at the range. We did get gun safety conversations about rifles and shotguns because we had plenty of family friends who hunt. I do remember though, being told that when it came to our waterguns, we had to stop when someone asked us to stop. There was a real lesson about consent, in that it's fun to squirt each other with water on a hot day AND when someone doesn't want to get wet, you respect their wishes. But no, I never thought about the context that we were "playing" with weapons, which is really wild when you think about it.